First Look: Our Winter 2026 Writing Classes Are Live Now!
If your New Year's resolution involves writing your first short story, diving into screenplays, or getting moving on your memoir, we have good news for you.
I know we’re all very ready to wind down for the holiday season (see: the news, every day) but before you do — now’s the perfect time to commit to your writing goals for 2026. (Or to surprise a loved one with the present of helping them to commit to theirs!)
We have a very exciting lineup of brand-new classes and returning favorites starting this January and February, all of which are open for registration now. As always, Narratively Academy paid members get 20% off each and every class you join, so if you’re not a member yet, you can get on that right here.
Before we get into it, quick reminder that this Sunday is our Mindfulness + Meditation Mini-Retreat for Writers. Also, for those of you whose 2026 goals include finally writing that book, we can’t wait to get started with the inaugural Narratively Book Incubator we just announced last week. OK, on with the winter class lineup!
If you’re just starting to think about how your memoir might take shape, this first one’s for you. In the 90-Minute Seminar for Kickstarting Your Memoir, author and writing coach Kern Carter will teach you how to find your voice, identify the parts of your life worth sharing, and ensure that your memoir connects emotionally with readers. This fun, fast-paced 90-minute seminar will get your memoir juices flowing first thing in the new year.
This fall, our first-ever Personal Essay Incubator sold out in like a millisecond, so we’ve gone ahead and launched not one but two sessions starting in January — one led by Narratively executive editor Jesse Sposato and one by Narratively contributing editor Caroline Rothstein. Each 10-week program is a unique opportunity for just six writers to learn the essentials of how to craft first-person pieces that resonate with editors and readers; develop an in-depth understanding of the personal essay marketplace; and learn how to refine your own work and polish it for publication.
If you’re a journalist or essayist who has always wanted to try your hand at a screenplay, 2026 is your chance to commit. Bill Gullo is a very accomplished Hollywood screenwriter and longtime educator. In this fun, fast-paced class, he’ll show you how to write a “vomit draft” of a screenplay in eight weeks. What’s a vomit draft? It’s just what it sounds like: fast and disgusting, but productive. Plus, you’ll feel better after you’re done! Throughout these eight weeks, Bill will walk you through all the details of how to get that full first draft finished in a way that allows you to move forward with intention.
We’ve heard this from many of you now: Nonfiction is great, but we also want to learn how to write short fiction! Well, we have the absolute best person on tap to teach that — longtime editor of The Best American Short Stories, Heidi Pitlor! In How to Write Your Best Short Story, an intimate three-hour seminar, Heidi will offer a rare look inside a beloved American genre, guiding writers in exploring how to make informed decisions in order to write stories that ultimately engage, transport and move readers.
One of our perennially popular classes, Katey Schultz’s The Fine Art of Deep Revision explores how revising your own writing can be efficient, productive and even fun — once you identify the concrete techniques that work best for you. Our previous sessions of this class all sold out quickly, so grab a seat now if you want to get to work on revising your own writing projects this winter.
We got a bunch of requests to offer another session of How to Write a Nonfiction Book Proposal That Sells, and we also scheduled this one for a Sunday time slot that can work for writers in many different time zones. Over four sessions, Narratively contributing editor Shawna Kenney, who has published an award-winning memoir, authored two nonfiction books and edited an anthology, will guide you through how to write a compelling book proposal that will demand attention from publishers.
We’ve also very happy Caroline Rothstein will be teaching another session of her sold-out class, Deeply Personal: Writing First-Person Essays on Raw and Difficult Topics. It’s been so wonderful to see the writers in this small workshop class develop close relationships while they explore writing *those* kinds of pieces — the ones you always want to write but that require a push to figure out how to tell them in the right way.
It was fantastic to have Rafael Frumkin teach our very first fiction class this winter. Writers loved that one-off seminar so much that we’ve decided to expand it to a full six-week workshop. In From Essays to Novels: Fiction Writing for the Nonfiction Writer, Rafael will help you put the considerable research and storytelling skills you’ve built as a memoirist, essayist, journalist or scholar to work on your first substantial piece of fiction.
This one’s other workshop class that spun out of a popular seminar in the fall. Magical realism — which blends fantasy with reality — is a wonderful genre in its own right, but it can also be used as a plot device in memoir and nonfiction to help emphasize otherwise complicated themes. Jasper “Jaz” Joyner used it to great effect in their Richard Wright Literary Award-winning work, Pansy: A Black American Memoir. This February, Jaz will lead How to Write a Memoir with Magical Realism, an intensive six-week workshop, in which students will learn how to shape an effective (and true!) memoir using fantastical elements borrowed from this beloved genre.
Questions about any of these classes? Drop us a line: academy@narratively.com